[maemo-users] problem starting n800

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Neil MacLeod wrote:
>> I deleted a video from the card and then it worked fine. So it seems a
>> bad file can stop the device booting without any hint as to what the
>> problem might be!
>>
>>
>> Is this a bug that is fixed in the next firmware, if not what should i
>> file this against?

Yes, it should.


>> Thanks for the clues, Michael
> 
> This tends to confirm the theory that removing SD cards can help a 
> device that is refusing to boot. Obviously it shouldn't be possible to 
> get a device into such a situation but clearly something is happening in 
> the boot sequence whereby a corrupt fs can prevent the device from booting.
> 
> Hopefully it's fixed in the next firmware, I don't think anyone has 
> posted technical details about what exactly may be happening and why SD 
> cards result in a boot failure.

I think the problem is that when the device mounts the MMC during
the boot process, metalayer-crawler gets inotified about that and
starts scanning the contents of the MMC.

Metalayer-crawler didn't handle possible errors from corrupted (MMC FAT)
filesystems well enough and as a result it in worst case ended up up
taking all memory and CPU in the device.  This is fixed in the next
release.  It should also now react properly/promptly to user removing
the MMC.

There might also have been problems with some specific video files.
What was the format of the video files which removing helped?


	- Eero